


Gone on Holiday

by allthegoodnamesaretakendammit



Series: The Boys of Magnolia Crescent [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Confessions, Drama, Fix-It, Gen, M/M, Order of the Phoenix - Freeform, Pre-Slash, Slow Build, but not too much, endgame snarry - Freeform, snarry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-11 18:56:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18430085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthegoodnamesaretakendammit/pseuds/allthegoodnamesaretakendammit
Summary: When Harry arrives at 4 Privet Drive at the start of summer, it's empty and clean, since the Dursleys are still in Majorca for another week. It's actually not a bad place to live when nobody else is in it.





	Gone on Holiday

 

When Harry arrives at 4 Privet Drive at the start of summer, it's empty and clean, since the Dursleys are still in Majorca for another week. It's actually not a bad place to live when nobody else is in it. Aunt Petunia had thoughtfully left a £10 note on the kitchen table--just enough to live on. As soon as Harry’s lugged his trunk upstairs, he heads right back out the front door again and makes the eight-block trek over to the corner shop. Harry buys bread, rice, eggs, tomato soup, and whatever else his scrawny arms and his meagre allowance can afford him. By the time he gets back, the whole neighborhood is lit with that warm early evening glow, and even Privet Drive can’t help but look welcoming in it.

It’s odd, unlocking the front door like this place belongs to him. That feeling only grows when he puts the groceries away and gets cracking on his Transfigurations homework in the kitchen, where Aunt Petunia would scream if she saw him. It’s not that he _wants_ to work on it; it’s just that he has to while he still has the chance. In all truth, he’s only got the first ten sentences scribbled down when the doorbell rings, the chime echoing through the empty house. Harry pops up from his seat and he’s curious enough to swing the door open without checking first to see who’s on the other side.

Of course, with his luck, it turns out to be Snape.

He’s wearing dark, broody Muggle clothing and his hair is lank in the summer heat. Harry stares up at him while Snape glares right back down at him. And then, after a long moment, Harry decides that if Snape were here to kill him, then he’d probably have put on a better disguise. So Harry opens the door wider and steps aside. If Snape’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. He just strides through the front door and walks down the hallway like he’s got the deed to the house tucked in his pocket, leaving Harry to trail after him. By the time Harry catches up to him, Snape is already seated on a kitchen chair like it’s a throne of wrought silver, encrusted with emeralds and crafted with pure malevolence. It is truly one of the oddest experiences of Harry’s life, watching Snape sneer at Dudley’s baby pictures hanging on the wall.

He tears his glaring eyes away from them long enough to address Harry for the first time all evening. “The Headmaster seems to think you need a minder,” Snape says shortly, before pulling a small paperback out of his pocket and snapping it open. The cover reads _Antony and Cleopatra_ and there’s a watercolor snake coiled on the cover, because of course there is. But maybe the weirdest thing about it is seeing Snape hold something with a cute little penguin on it, even if it’s only the logo for Penguin Books.

“Are you going to stare at me all evening, Potter, or do you actually plan on making yourself useful?” Harry bites his tongue and flips to where he’d last been in his Transfigurations textbook, dipping his quill to re-ink it.

Time passes a lot faster, then. The fact is cementing itself further and further in Harry’s mind: Privet Drive is an alright place when there are no Dursleys around. And even Snape’s a pretty peaceful presence as long as they’re not talking or looking at each other or breathing too loud.

Fading sunlight sends dying sparks across the kitchen table as Harry scratches away on parchment. Snape turns a page exactly once every minute. Harry knows that because he’s been counting. Things go that way for the better part of an hour and, when he realizes that he’s still counting Snape’s page-turns, Harry has the sudden suspicion that this essay’s not going to turn out very good.

Also, he’s starting to get hungry, but he’s nervous about trying to cook. It’s all too easy to imagine Snape following him to the stove and criticizing the clumsy way he stirs tomato soup counter-clockwise. It doesn’t matter that Snape hasn’t done anything especially horrible to him since the Great Veritaserum Incident of 1995. From then on, their interactions have been characterized by banked malice, vast silences, and a frankly disconcerting amount of eye contact. On the off-chance that today is the day that breaks that pattern, Harry just doesn’t feel like pressing his luck.

But after another thirty minutes pass, Harry can’t look at his shoddy essay anymore. So he closes his textbook and rereads the hand-written note hiding underneath it. Aunt Petunia had left it along with the money, and it was little more than a terse pair of sentences informing him that Vernon had recently bought a vacant parcel of land on Magnolia Crescent and that Harry wasn’t to go near it.

He couldn’t help but wonder if the Blood Wards would extend that far, if he chose to step foot on the lot just because she’d told him not to. And the _reason_ he thought about that was because Voldemort had been dragged out of this world and into the next and, a day and a half later, Dumbledore had told Harry about the prophecy. _It seems prudent,_ he’d said, _now that our enemy is both nearer and farther than ever._ Then came the rest of the story, from beginning to end.

All of it.

The Order. Trelawney. Snape.

It’s that last thought that persuades Harry to drop the note he’s been rereading for the last five minutes and address the man who’s been pretending to read Shakespeare for over an hour. But first, Harry stands and walks to the kitchen sink, which has the perfect amount of space on its edge for Harry to grip it angrily when Vernon yelled or Petunia scolded.

“You killed her. My mum,” Harry says to the sink. He can almost _feel_ Snape go still behind him, a surge of self-loathing almost tangible in the air.

The word, when it finally comes, is as soft as snow: “Yes.”

“Would she… would she be the type of person to forgive you for it?” Harry asks to the empty air.

The answer seems to come to Snape more easily this time. His voice carries absolute certainty when he says, “No. Never.”

“Then I won’t, either,” Harry replies, his shoulders slumping in a strange sort of relief. “You can’t take back any of the things you’ve done. To my parents, to me, to anyone.” His fingers are loosening on the lip of the sink, his heart slowing down.

Snape's a bit like Pettigrew, except that he never defends what he’s done. There is none of the begging and _why’_ s and _if you’d been in my shoes_ and cowardice. Snape knows his own crimes perfectly well and--to all appearances--holds no old allegiances. The one who’d _really_ killed them was Voldemort. And he's dead and gone, though Harry imagines he’ll be back soon enough. How many Death Eaters were still keeping their black robes pressed and clean, their masks hung up in the back of their closets, just waiting for him to return...

Harry turns to face Snape, who looks like a gargoyle hunched in a muggle kitchen instead of on the parapet of a cathedral, where he belongs. “You could kill him, couldn’t you?” Harry wonders aloud. Snape’s expression is dark, but alert enough that Harry knows he’s still listening. “Voldemort, I mean. For good. You and Dumbledore know him better than anyone. You could guess where he’d go when he’s weak, who he’d contact, stop him before he returns to full power. Destroy him before he does anything else.”

“Given the time and resources,” Snape says. His voice is as low and sibilant as ever, but his eyes are half-lidded as if he has an entire litany of fantasies about it. As if there were things he knew that Harry doesn’t. And really, the secrets that are kept from Harry seem bottomless.

That look draws Harry in, makes him walk back up to the table, drag his chair out, and sit down. He isn’t sure what questions to voice, so he doesn’t ask any. He just sits and waits--for once the quiet, patient student that Snape has always informed him he isn’t.

“There have been developments,” Snape begins, his voice as ominous as ever. “Under the considerable sway of Veritaserum, Lucius Malfoy and Walden Macnair have confessed to over a hundred crimes between them. When pressed, they admitted that the Dark Lord has previously alluded to the secret behind his immortality. The Headmaster persuaded a third witness to come forward and independently verify their claims.”

Harry is fully leaning forward now, physically _needing_ to know. “Horcruxes,” Snape says, as if that single word explains it all. In some ways, it’s a relief that he assumes that Harry is thick, since it means that he immediately launches into a brutal explanation of what the ruddy hell a Horcrux is.

It’s a good twenty minutes before Harry feels like he understands the full scope of it. The diary. Nagini. That less than human quality to Voldemort after he’d been reborn. What would he look like the next time he returned? Would he be as much of a monster on the outside as he was on the inside?

And honestly, if all of this had come out, then shouldn’t there be a wizarding panic? Harry opens his mouth to ask about it, but Snape is already ahead of him, waspishly noting, “This information has been suppressed from the Ministry at large and the public. Only the prosecutors, the Aurors involved, the Minister, and the Headmaster are aware of it.” And, presumably, the entire Order.

It makes sense, trying to keep a tight lid on information this important, this _damning._ But in the meantime, people would think that they were safe, that everything was good and right and there was nothing to worry about. How were they ever going to find Voldemort’s horcruxes if next to no one knew that they were supposed to be looking for them?

Frustrated and still hungry, Harry shoves himself out of his chair again and throws open the pantry so that he can start making soup. He puts the pot on the stove with a clang and cranks the heat on. Cracking into the soup with an old-fashioned can opener is intensely cathartic. He pours its contents into the pot, chucks the can into the rubbish bin since the Dursleys are too petty to recycle, and then he throws himself back into his chair.

Slouched this far back, he can stare at the ceiling and reminisce about the stains Dudley had left there when he had taken to throwing his food around age five. “Where do you think he is now?” Harry asks Snape at last.

“Everywhere.” Harry’s head whips toward him, eyes wide. Snape’s voice is a length of black velvet, tying itself in ropes around Harry’s heart. There is absolute hate in his eyes as he stares out the window, saying, “He’s torn himself to pieces and scattered himself in the wind. If and when we encounter him, it will only be one out of an entire collection.”

“How--” Harry swallows shakily and tries to get the words out. “How many?”

“There’s no telling. But the Headmaster suspects seven.” Harry imagines cutting himself into seven pieces and can’t. Watching Pettigrew cleave himself in two had been more than enough to turn his stomach. And that was just his _body._

Restless again, Harry stands and stirs his soup, asking it, “Does having that many make him stronger or weaker?”

“Strategically, it makes him next to invincible. Magically, it has to be a strain. There’s only so much of a soul that you can afford to splinter off.”

Harry leans back against the counter, spoon still in hand when he says, “They can get stronger, the horcruxes. The diary almost had enough power to become an actual person. If they can all think and talk like that...”

“Then they are able to manipulate, to control, like the original himself,” Snape confirmed with poison in his voice, as if he knew that fact very well. “His soul may not have fractured evenly. There’s no reason to believe that they’ll all be sentient, but there’s no excuse not to prepare for it.”

The question came, as it did during every year of Harry’s life since he turned eleven: “What’s Dumbledore going to do?”

“Gather information, as he’s been doing for nearly half a century. Consolidate the Order. Prattle on about the power of love.”

The words tumble out, reckless and half-thought before they leave him: “What about you? What are you going to do?” With the way Snape’s head snaps toward him, Harry expects him to spit something like, _What are_ you _going to do, you miserable little cretin?_ Or, _That’s no business of yours, Potter._

His eyes are blazing, yes, but with murderous intent that’s not directed at Harry. “Thwart him,” Snape says, his words scalding with promise. “At every turn. For as long as it takes. Make him crave what he fears most.”

It’s kind of inspirational, the conviction he hears in Snape’s voice. Harry still hasn’t decided how to answer him when the soup starts bubbling and popping behind him, so he gets up and takes it off the heat before it can burn and turn to glue at the bottom of the pot. He spoons some into a bowl and puts the rest in the fridge for later.

When he sits back down at the table, he eats and thinks and eats and thinks. There is no more pretending to read, no more talk of horcruxes. Snape, Merlin bless him, doesn’t even make a snide remark about Harry’s slurping or his sloppy scrubbing technique when he washes the dishes and leaves them out to dry.

When the kitchen is clean again, Harry takes his seat, the constant up-and-down of cooking now over. He looks Snape dead in the eye and he’s got just one question on the brain. “What would she want?” Harry asks him, and there’s something freeing about it--knowing that he doesn’t need to explain himself, knowing that Snape will know exactly who he means. “If she could see all of this, what would she tell us to do?”

“Win.”

The last dregs of sunlight have come and gone, leaving a purple cast to the light. It catches strangely on Snape’s dark clothes, and Harry’s eyes linger on where he knows the Dark Mark must be. It gets him thinking about the rest of the Death Eaters, the graveyard, the ghost of his mum. When Harry had seen her last, all she’d wanted was for him to let go, to live, to be alright. But that couldn’t happen--not _really_ \--until Voldemort was gone for good. And Merlin knew Voldemort wasn’t leaving on his own.

“Let’s hunt him, then.”

Snape looks incredulous, insulted, and maybe, possibly, just a little bit intrigued. So Harry tries to explain. “Dumbledore knows his history and practically everything about magic. You know how he thinks. My scar hurts when he’s nearby. With all that together, couldn’t we--I dunno, track him down?”

Snape’s gaze is sharp, looking him up and down as if trying to see him through someone else’s eyes. “The Headmaster will say you’re too young to be on the front lines,” he sneers, as if he doesn’t believe it himself.

“I’m already on the front lines,” Harry answers easily, because it’s plainly true.

Snape must know it, too, because he doesn’t even argue with him. They just stare at each other for a long moment, the sun having finally set between them. Then Snape abruptly stands, slipping the slim book back into his pocket and making for the door, the regular amount of venom back in his voice when he says, “I’ll inform the Headmaster of your delusions of grandeur. Andromeda Tonks and Mundungus Fletcher are standing watch outside under Disillusionment. Try not to get yourself killed in the meantime.”

Then the front door closes behind him and the house is silent again. “Berk,” Harry says, just because he can.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The edition Snape is reading is Shakespeare’s _Antony and Cleopatra_ , reprinted in 1982 by Penguin Books and edited by T. Spencer. The notes are helpful, but I would recommend using more recent editions unless you want to get hopelessly lost in Elizabethan English.


End file.
